R.J. Stevens writes, “I want to challenge you to take the 10 or 15 minutes necessary to read Mike Horton’s excellent piece titled Gnostic Worship, which is linked below. Here are a few excerpts from that article:

Essential to this Gnostic orientation is the immediacy of the divine-human relationship. At the time of the Reformation, Martin Luther contrasted “the theology of glory” (held by Roman Catholics and Anabaptists) with “the theology of the cross” (held by the apostles and the reformers). Every person, Luther said, is a mystic deep-down. We all want to climb a ladder into God’s presence – whether it’s a ladder of experience and emotion, or a ladder of merit (If you do this, I’ll do that, steps to victory, etc.), or a ladder of speculation (I’m going to figure God out apart from his public self-disclosure in Scripture). Luther called this the human longing to see “the naked God.”

“We automatically assume that having a personal relationship with God is a good thing. We invite people not so much to confess that they are helpless sinners, spiritually dead and enemies of God, who need to turn from self to rely on Christ alone for salvation, but instead we push them more to enter into a personal relationship with God by experiencing a direct encounter of rebirth. In Scripture, it is not always a good thing to be close to God.”

“Throughout the Scriptures, God is only approachable through a human mediator, and he only saves in human history, using human words, and physical earthly elements. Those who attempt to worship God in their own way, find him as much a consuming fire in the New Testament as in the Old (Heb. 12:29). “But that’s the Old Testament!”, Gnostics will say. Yes, but while much changes in the administration of the covenant between the two testaments, one thing remains the same: The covenant of grace still requires a mediator. We cannot approach God directly. Just as God struck down Nadab and Abihu, so he killed Ananias and Saphira in his presence (Acts 5:1-11). (Online source)